Common as Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown (41 page)

I knew I’d made the right decision not to try to break America almost as soon as we arrived back in Britain. George rang me to say I’d been voted the Club Star Awards Comedy Entertainer of 1992. It was a clubland award, voted for by all the club secretaries and organised by
The Stage
, the main British show-business journal. I was told that I’d won it mainly for my ad libs and putdowns. I was made up. It was another poke in the eye for those carping critics who dismissed my act without ever having seen a Chubby Brown show, saying that because it was crude and offensive it couldn’t possibly be funny.

The more videos and theatre tickets I sold, the more the critics wanted to knock me. They were delighted when I was run off stage in Gateshead in the opening minutes of a show in the early 1990s when, at the height of the child-abuse scandal in the North-East, I opened my show by saying, ‘I’m surprised that there are so many of you here – I thought you’d all be at home fucking the kids.’ And they loved it when lefty do-gooder councillors in Middlesbrough banned me from playing at the local town hall. I thought it was ridiculous. After all, which was more offensive? A council that let a comic tell crude jokes at its town hall? Or a council that presided over thousands of kids still growing up dirt poor in run-down Grangetown and Slaggy Island estates with little chance of a decent education or a proper job?

What those po-faced councillors didn’t realise was that every attempt to push me underground directly boosted my video and ticket sales. The more my bawdy, vulgar end-of-the-pier humour was outlawed or denigrated as offensive or unfashionable, the more the public wanted to see it, simply because we all like what’s naughty. Like drugs or Prohibition alcohol, my tapes
had an anti-PC under-the-counter word-of-mouth cachet about them that made
Jingle Bollocks
the sixth-biggest seller in 1994, just behind
Snow White
and
Jurassic Park
and far ahead of popular ‘alternative’ comedians such as Steve Coogan.

The videos were selling so well that Polydor, the company that distributed them, tried to persuade me to release two a year. They’d awarded me a statuette for outselling all the other videos they distributed, although they hadn’t invited me along to the dinner at which it was handed out even though I was netting them about five million quid a year. Worried that I’d swear in front of their guest Princess Anne, one of the Polydor top brass accepted the statuette on my behalf and told me about it after the event. I was told that they thought I’d say ‘Thank you, you fucking cunts’ and not have the brains to know how to be polite. Nevertheless, they recognised a cash cow when they saw one and pestered me to release more videos each year. When I said it was asking too much of me to give away another sixty minutes of my material without spending a year preparing it and bedding it in on stage, Polydor suggested that I should make a movie.

I’d written a story about a band, like
Spinal Tap
but more down to earth. Based on my experiences in The Pipeline and the Four Man Band, it started with a band auditioning for members in a council house and assembling a motley crew including a drug addict, a ladies’ man and a drummer who was very ambitious. The idea was to show how bands are often made up of very different types of people and how that can lead to some very funny escapades. No sooner had I presented the idea to Polydor than
The Commitments
came out. The film was just as I had envisaged my film and immediately killed off that idea, so Polydor sent two writers up from London. We spent several days sitting around a table trying to come up with jokes, but Londoners just don’t seem to have the same sense of humour.
Polydor sent me several scripts, but in the end I had to tell them that although some of the ideas were good, they just weren’t funny. It was off-the-wall college humour, funny to students but too avant-garde for my audience. ‘I know it’s about me,’ I told the executives at Polydor, ‘but I don’t want my name on it. It’s just not common enough. It’s not about ordinary people.’

In the end, we took the two writers’ plot, I added some humour and the result was
UFO
, a science-fiction spoof in which UFO stood not for Unidentified Flying Object but You Fuck Off.

The plot involved a bloke who was kidnapped to another planet where he became the first man to have a baby. Quite excited by the project, I spent six weeks at Pinewood Studios and on location in Blackpool, working from seven in the morning until eleven at night to shoot the film – a rush job by film standards and a record according to Tony Dow, the director.

Tony had planned scenes on the beach at Blackpool, on the Golden Mile, up the Tower and outside the South Pier Theatre. I was all for it, but I warned him that I’d be on my home turf and we would be regularly interrupted by Jack the lads shouting ‘Chubby! You fat bastard!’ or flashing their arses out of windows in the background.

‘Don’t worry,’ Tony said. ‘We’re used to it. We can handle it.’

On the first day in Blackpool, I was just getting into shooting a scene with Jackie Downey, who played my wife, when a lad in the street shouted out a typical comment. ‘Chubby!’ he said. ‘Kiss me ring-piece!’

‘Cut!’ shouted an assistant director and we had to start again.

Jackie looked at me. ‘Aye, you’re dead popular, aren’t you?’ she said.

‘I told you. I did say …’ I said.

It was great to work with proper actors. Sara Stockbridge, a trendy model-cum-actress at the time, was lovely, as was Jackie.
Sara had to run naked through a park in one scene. I hadn’t realised how many blokes were on the crew until it came to shooting that scene and they all turned up. And when Shirley Anne Field walked onto the set, my mouth nearly hit the floor, even though she was in her late fifties. In common with many lads of my generation, Shirley had been adolescent fantasy material and was still a beautiful woman. Sue Lloyd from
Crossroads
and Roger Lloyd-Pack, a real character who I knew from
Only Fools and Horses
, were also working on the film.

If I was gigging in the evening I’d leave the set at six p.m., jump in a car, travel to the theatre, do a show, then travel back to Pinewood or Blackpool. If I wasn’t gigging, when the shoot wrapped I’d sit in the studio until two in the morning, trying to improve the script. It was long hours and hard work. By the end, my eyes were in the back of my head.

When we watched the final edited film, I thought a lot of it was crap, but there were several parts that people talked about afterwards and fortunately they were the parts I wrote, such as a scene in which a girl asks me to record a message on a cassette for her brother who was in a coma and I said: ‘Get out of bed, you lazy cunt.’

We premiered
UFO
at the Showcase in Middlesbrough. Knowing that we wouldn’t attract any real celebrities, we invited all our friends and relations and hired lookalikes of the Queen, Prince Charles and Rod Stewart. I walked on stage and introduced the film, an awkward experience as by then I was becoming uncomfortable with some aspects of it and I really didn’t want to watch it through. Sometimes fans come up to me and say they’ve watched it twenty times and that they love it, but I’d rather it was consigned to the vaults.

However, for every embarrassment there were half a dozen triumphs, one of which was selling out the London Palladium. In Middlesbrough, it even made the newspapers. ‘Chubby on at
Palladium,’ the local rag said. People stopped me in the street. ‘Fucking hell!’ they’d say. ‘You’ve come a long way!’ Then they’d add the usual punchline: ‘Eeh, I remember paying six bob to see you.’

When I arrived at the Palladium and looked at the photographs of the stars on the walls, a shiver ran down my spine. Every big star had played there. Like me, many of them had skeletons in their cupboards, but I bet few could claim to have played Wallsend Labour Club, where a stripper once pissed in the dressing-room sink, the night before they were on at the London Palladium.

The dressing room was a disgrace. It was shabby and dirty. The stage manager poked his head around the door. ‘You’ve obviously given me the pigsty,’ I said. ‘The dressing room you keep for people like me.’

‘This is the number one dressing room,’ he said. ‘They’ve all been in here, you know. Liza Minnelli, Sammy Davis Junior, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby – they all sat there, where you’re sitting.’ That shut me up.

At eight p.m. I was in front of the footlights of the West End’s most revered stage, but my mind was a mess. I was too busy wrestling with my stomach to be able to think clearly. ‘Boys and girls,’ I said, ‘I wonder if Shirley Bassey has peed in the sink in the dressing room here. Mind you, she doesn’t pop her cork for anyone.’ Not the right joke for the Palladium – the audience gave a few polite grunts. ‘Don’t worry if you don’t like the one I’m telling,’ I said. ‘You can always run in the gents’ toilet and get another gag off the wall.’

Slowly the audience warmed up. Within seconds of hearing the first belly laughs I was in full flow. I’ve never concentrated as hard as I did that night on the Palladium stage. Although the house was packed with fans, I knew that some of the audience were there simply because I was playing the Palladium, rather
than because they were hard-core Chubby supporters. In front of them, I couldn’t afford to make a mistake. After the show I sat in the chair in my dressing room, trying to come to terms with it. When I first stood on those sticky stages in Grangetown and Redcar claggy mats and clubs, I never dreamed that I’d play the London Palladium, no matter how long or hard I worked. Detention, Borstal, prison, arsehole, cunt, fat bastard … and now sold out at the greatest and most famous theatre in the world.

George and I took the crew out for a celebratory dinner. ‘You’ve done it now,’ George said, but I felt it was more a case of surviving than triumphing. An accomplishment rather than a victory. I was pleased to have done it, but somehow it didn’t mean as much to me as a packed-out barnstormer on my home turf.

When I got back to Teesside I bumped into Steve Purnell, a lovely fella married to Brian Findlay’s sister and who in the early 1970s drove me to clubland gigs for a short while when I was in trouble for driving without tax and insurance. Steve worked as a bread man, delivering loaves of Mother’s Pride to houses in Redcar. After about three or four months of driving me to Alcock & Brown gigs, he told me that he’d always wanted to play the drums, so I taught him the basics. Six months later Steve was a better drummer than I’d ever been. He was obviously a natural talent and practised until his hands bled. It wasn’t long before Steve rang me to say he wouldn’t be able to drive me to gigs any more. He’d got a job playing drums at a local club four nights a week, getting up at four a.m. to deliver the bread until two p.m., then having a few hours’ rest before drumming until midnight. Another year or so later, I heard that Steve had landed a job with Smokie, a country-rock group that was particularly successful in Germany and which had scored a few Top Ten hits in Britain
with ‘Oh Carol’ and ‘Living Next Door To Alice’. With his hangdog moustache, long hair and cowboy hat, Steve certainly looked the part.

When I bumped into Steve in Redcar in 1995, he’d been playing with Smokie for about fifteen years. ‘Have you heard the version of “Alice” that the Irish shout?’ he asked me. ‘At the end of every chorus, they shout “Who the fuck is Alice?” at us.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘Sounds great.’

‘We want to record it as a spoof,’ Steve said. ‘But we’d never get away with saying “fuck”, so we thought you, what with your reputation, would be the best man for the “Who the fuck is Alice?” bit.’

A few weeks later, I met the lads from Smokie in a recording studio in Wakefield. We recorded the track in an afternoon, with me adding all the ‘fucks’. The single was released in two versions – the raw, uncensored song and a version with all the ‘fucks’ bleeped out so that it could be played on the radio. Shortly before it was released, Smokie’s lead singer Alan Barton was killed in a car crash on a German autobahn. The band were devastated and decided to donate any royalties from the single to Alan’s wife. I happily agreed to follow suit, but I didn’t think the royalties for a spoof record would ever amount to much. In its first week on sale, the single entered the charts at number twenty-eight. And in those days, you had to sell a substantial number of records just to get into the Top Thirty.

When it rose to number twenty, we were invited onto
Top of the Pops
, where I lip-synched to the bleeped version. The next week, it went into the Top Ten and we were back on
Top of the Pops
. When the record company released it internationally, ‘Who The Fuck Is Alice?’ went to number one in Australia and several European countries. In Britain, kept off the number-one spot by Simply Red, it reached number two and became one of
the most popular parts of my theatre gigs, an eternal crowd-pleaser that I’ve brought out of retirement several times simply because audiences demand it.

The record earned a fortune around the world and every penny of my royalties went to Alan’s wife.

In early 1995, just before I recorded ‘Who The Fuck Is Alice?’ with Smokie, I made Sandra a very generous financial offer. Things had got so bad between us that I just wanted out. But Sandra turned it down so I pushed the matter to the back burner, hoping to find another way of getting her off my back. But by July, when the ‘Who The Fuck Is Alice?’ single was ready to be released, my love life had got a whole lot more complicated.

Estelle Keogh was a barmaid at the De Vere Hotel in Blackpool, where I was staying every weekend of my summer season at the South Pier Theatre. Twenty-three years old, she was a bonny lass with a pretty face and long dark hair. I’d noticed Estelle behind the bar during the previous summer season, but had never got talking to her. One evening we started chatting and from then on I’d always drop by the bar when I was staying at the hotel, just to say hello.

Four or five weeks into the Blackpool season, I asked Estelle where was the best place to eat on a Sunday in Blackpool. ‘I don’t like all those fancy places,’ I said. ‘I just want a good roast dinner with a nice Yorkshire pudding.’